WhatsApp to Allow Users to Hide ‘Last Seen’ from Specific Contacts

Users of WhatsApp, the popular messaging app, will soon be able to customize their privacy settings. The company is working on a new feature that will let users hide their “Last Seen” status from specific contacts instead of hiding it from everyone.

The feature, which was discovered by WABetaInfo, is not yet available to WhatsApp users — even the beta testers.

Usually, WhatsApp shows other users whether you’re online or when you were last seen in the app, and one can only choose to show this status to everyone, friends only, or no one at all.

The new upcoming update will give WhatsApp users a fourth option in the “Last Seen” status menu, which is “My Contacts Except.”

The new update means that you can set exceptions to hide your status from specific users, but everyone else not selected will still be able to see it.

“Initially, if you didn’t want a specific contact could see your last seen, you had to set the privacy setting of your last seen to “Nobody”. Today WhatsApp is finally working to introduce another option called “My contacts except…”, so you can finally enable your last seen back, and you can disable it for specific contacts!” explained the website.

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According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp will also implement the same option for privacy settings for those who can see your profile picture and other information.

“You can see “My contacts except” for last seen in this screenshot, but this also applies to other privacy settings as well, such as “profile picture” and “about”. Note that, if you disable your last seen for specific contacts, you won’t be able to see theirs,” it added.

It’s unclear when this feature will be available for everyone, but it will probably take a while since not even WhatsApp Beta users have access to this new option. Earlier this week, it was revealed that WhatsApp is also working to implement reactions to messages, similar to what iMessage, Instagram, and Twitter provide.